Topoi (2005) 24: 183-195
DOI 10.1007/sl 1245-005-5054-4
Citizen Child: Play as Welfare Parameter
for Urban Life
Is urban development and planning an issue for
philosophers? The most trivial answer would be:
sure it is, as long as philosophers are citizens
themselves. But there are also more specific
reasons that should make urban life a worthy object
of philosophical consideration. Some languages
(like Italian and French) have the idiomatic
expression “philosophy of governance”, which has
analogous meaning to the English “philosophy of
life”, only with reference to governance: therefore,
paraphrasing the Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary
(11th edition), we can translate the idea of
philosophy of governance as “an overall vision of
or attitude toward governance and the purpose of
governance”. To take this idea seriously, we need
to try to figure out what is (if any) our current
overall vision or attitude toward governance and its
purpose, and how this vision might help or get in
the way of improving our life. Even if we do not
share Plato’s idea that philosophers should be the
rulers of the city (actually, I will suggest in this
article that children might do a better job of it), it is
important to involve them in the current debate on
the philosophy of governance of our cities.
The city governors take decisions regarding
practical aspects of people’s lives, such as transport,
housing, services. These decisions interact with a
basic problem concerning the happiness of the
citizens, an issue that is essentially philosophic in
nature. The city can tackle problems such as the
traffic, the speed of city travel, the safeguarding of
public spaces of priority importance, while
sacrificing the needs of communication, social
intercourse and serenity, in particular for the weaker
citizens.
Conversely, it may give priority to ensure that
children and the elderly have the right to play and
to mobility, to seek security in solidarity and
participation, to defend urban aesthetics as an
inalienable right.
Springer 2005
Francesco Tonucci
The mayor of Curitiba, in Brazil, said that he
succeeded in equipping all the quarters of his city
with public libraries and providing them with good
books by not constructing one kilometre of
motorway. To stress the fact that spending on
children is not a mere cost but a true productive
investment, Kofi Annan, United Nations Secretary-
General, ended his opening address on 8 May 2002 at
New York UN Special Session on Children by
saying: «How can we fail, above all now that we
know that each dollar invested in improving the
conditions of children has a return of a good 7 dollars
for society as a whole?». These, among others, are
the decisions defining the philosophy of governance
in our cities.
This leads to the main claim of this article: allowing
children to play according to their needs (and in
contrast to what is permitted by a city suited only to
the needs of adults) guarantees healthier, more serene
and more productive adults. In other words, play is
indeed a key feature in urban policies. But why is it
so? Why and how should children’s play be a
relevant parameter in assessing urban policies? A
tentative answer to this problem is presented in the
following pages: I will start sketching the latest
evolution (or rather involution) of urban structure and
organization (cf. 1), emphasizing how this defines an
environment which is basically forbidden and hostile
to children, unless they are escorted by adults (cf. 2);
I will summarize the impact of such an environment
on children’s play, and therefore on children’s
development (cf. 3), stressing the different criteria of
spatial movement and fruition applied by children
compared with adults (cf. 4), and the extreme danger
of systematically isolating children from the
experience of danger – a well-known paradoxical
feature of modern education (cf. 5). Finally, I will
propose a radical alternative to current urban
policies, considering children and their play
as the main focus, rather than a marginal and
unwelcome problem only to be faced as an
afterthought (cf. 6), and I will present several concrete
cases in which such an alternative has been put into
practice by children and politicians together, and its
effects tested and assessed (cf. 7). By way of
conclusion, similar experiences seem to justify a
moderate amount of hope for the future of our cities, in
spite of their present, worrisome conditions (cf. 8).
1. Urban development: a short overview
The modern city was born by breaking down the
mediaeval barrier separating the castle from the town
itself, in which a hierarchical relationship was set up. In
contrast, the modern city developed around a square, in
a space that was shared, despite differences in social
class and living conditions. Overlooking the square
were the government buildings, the cathedral, the
garrison barracks, the market square. The city was the
focal point for people to meet and mix in. The urban
space was shared, without different quarters for the
different social levels: in the streets of the city the
aristocrats’ palaces, often designed by great architects,
stood shoulder to shoulder with the humble craftsmen’s
homes. This alternation produced a town-planning
pattern that resulted in the beauty of many European
cities.
Over the past few decades, following World War II, the
city seems practically to have returned to the mediaeval
model: the rich historic centre has been emptied and has
become the site of business and service activities, and is
surrounded by new suburbs – more squalid and tougher
than the older ones, a poor and sometimes wretched
periphery, nondescript houses or shanties, which is
dependent on the rich city for its survival. The rich
centre is defended by the police, by closed-circuit
monitors and by numerous private security firms.
The city has given up being a place of meeting and
intercourse and has chosen as its new development
criteria separation and specialization. The separation
and specialization of space and skills: different places
for different persons, different places for different
functions.
The historic centre for banks, luxury shops,
entertainment; the outskirts for sleeping.
Then there are places for the children, the day-care
centre, the play park, the play centre; places for old
people, the rest home, the centre for the elderly; places
for knowledge, from the kindergarten to the university;
specialized places for buying things, the supermarket, the
shopping centre. Then there is the hospital, the place for
the sick (Bozzo, 1995; Mumford, 1975).
2. Cities without children
Once we could hardly wait to get out of the house, as
everything that we were most interested in was outside.
The home was the fundamental place of security,
primary needs and housework. However, it was
necessary to go out in order to meet friends, to play, to
go to the bar, the cinema, the library. And if there were
dangers, and there were indeed, we had to be careful, as
our parents used to tell us.
Today we can hardly wait to get back home, as the home
is the place for rest, culture, family affection,
communication. At home we have frozen food that lasts
for months, a library, our CD collection, our favourite
films, the possibility of talking on the phone or sending
messages or photos over the internet or by mobile phone.
The home is no longer an important but insufficient part
of the wider reality of the city: it rather subsumes the city
itself. It is no longer part of a complex ecosystem, but
itself tends towards self-sufficiency, another important
and disturbing feature of the modern city. A tendency
towards self-sufficiency is displayed by the various parts
of the city, from the home to the shopping centre.
In the past, doing the shopping meant following an
itinerary, going to different places, meeting various
persons, the same every day, so much so that every day
we exchanged some gossip, a story or the latest news.
Today to go shopping we usually travel from one part of
the city to another, or rather to another smaller and
efficient city, in which we can buy everything: the
shopping centre. This city has guaranteed parking as so
there are no cars, but it has streets and squares that are
safe for children, for whom dedicated serviced spaces are
often provided; here you can eat, do your banking, go to
the hairdresser’s and of course do your shopping.
A wonderful place, for many families, where they can
arrange to meet and spend the weekend together.
Degradation makes the city impossible to live in and we
defend ourselves by building safe protected places
184
where we can spend our leisure time in peace and
quiet.
This is a constant tendency in today’s city, which is
consistent with the logic of separation and
specialization: to create services and structures that
are increasingly independent and self-sufficient. This
is true for the hospital, the sports ground, the large
museums and the university campus (Germanos,
1995; Taylor et al., 1998; Bauman, 2001).
Moreover, in recent decades, the city has become a
kind of space that is practically reserved for
automobiles. Automobiles have invaded the public
spaces of the city, thus privatizing them, preventing
them from being used by pedestrians or cyclists. The
streets and squares are places of transit and parking
for private vehicles and no longer public spaces
whereby a group of private houses is turned into a
city. The automobiles always occupy the ground
level while it is the pedestrians who, in order to cross
the road, have to step down from the pavements,
descend into the underground crossings or climb over
pedestrian bridges; automobiles, even though they
have an engine, are always allowed to follow the flat
road, at ground level. Cars impose their own logic on
the city, their own aesthetics, their own “music”. Our
great cities are obliged to accommodate not only the
automobiles but also the vertical road signs and the
horizontal traffic signs on the ancient paving, thus
visually polluting the historic monuments and centres
(Garling, Valsiner, 1985).
All these changes happened in a very short time,
because the city, through its administrators, has
chosen as its typical citizen an adult, male, working
and car-driving citizen. The city adapted to suit his
needs, in order for the administrators to obtain the
votes of this stronger ideal-typical citizen. In doing so
they betrayed the needs and rights of those who are
not males, adults, workers, or motorists. As a result,
these cities are cities without children, where children
are prevented from living experiences of fundamental
importance for their development, such as adventure,
research, discovery, risk, overcoming obstacles and
therefore feeling satisfaction, frustration and emotion
(Lynch, 1979)1. These experiences demand two
fundamental conditions that are no longer available:
leisure time and shared public space. It is difficult for
children to go outside the home on their own, to seek
playmates or to go somewhere suitable for playing
with them. The real or alleged environmental
difficulties have convinced their parents that this city
does not allow a child of six or ten to go out on his or
her own, and so what used to be the children’s leisure
time has been turned into organized time dedicated to
different activities inside or outside the home, in any
case rigidly planned and usually having to be paid
for. On the one hand, therefore, we have TV, the play
station, internet, and on the other the various after-
school courses of sport, art and foreign languages
(Marillaud, 1991). And what about play? Children
cannot play by themselves anymore. So that they can
play, their parents escort the children to the local
game park or to a friend’s house or else invite their
friends home. Adults constantly wait for them and
supervise them. In this way, the most crucial feature
of play is lost to the children: they do not have any
autonomy.
3. In the beginning there is play
When we see our children so well dressed, so well
nourished and capable of using such complex
devices, speaking foreign languages at such an early
age, and really able to play a sport, respecting the
rules of the game and aware of all the tricks involved
from their early years, we adults often feel that they
are really lucky. They can do many things that we
could not, partly because they did not exist at the
time and partly because we could not afford them and
also because our parents did not understand such
things. It is true (we also reason) that our children
cannot run, go wild, get dirty, do odd and often
forbidden things, as we did at their age, but it is
worth the sacrifice. Today they know a lot more, they
are more intelligent.
A ten-year old girl on the Rome Children’s Council,
when discussing the different weight accorded in
children’s lives to the right to play and the right to
education, aptly summarizes this adult idea when she
says: «For our teachers it is important for us to go to
school as it prepares us for the future, while play is
something done only by children and so it is not
worth anything».
Against this nonchalant attitude of adults, who have
forgotten the value of their childhood experiences,
play activity proves to have fundamental importance
not only in the history of culture (Caillois, 1967;
Huizinga, 1939), but mostly in the personal
history of each woman and each man, since we have
several evidences that play lays at the foundation of
185
individual development. In his play, the child lives an
experience that is rare in life, that of measuring
himself alone with the complexity of the world. With
all his curiosity, with what he knows and can do, and
with what he does not know and wishes to learn, the
child confronts a world with all its stimuli, novelties,
and fascination. For him, playing means each time
carving out a piece of this world: a piece that will
include friends, objects, rules, a space to be occupied,
time to be managed and risks to be run. In total
freedom, because what is impossible to do in reality,
can be invented by imagination, free from the
constraints and limitations of the actual world. “I am
a mediaeval prince” a child may claim and from that
moment on, if the other accept the pretence, it is
possible to journey to another era and to respect its
rules and conditions: the broomstick will be a horse
for everyone, the ruler a dagger, the hut or tree or
space under the stairs a castle (Garvey, 1977;
Gombrich, 1971; Piaget, 1945; Vygotsky, 1966).
This allows the literal meaning of auto-nomy to be
realized, that is, the capacity of governing oneself
without external guidance, but rather determining
one’s own rules of behaviour (possibly inventing
them to the purpose) and then scrupulously fulfilling
them.
It is precisely thanks to this complex interaction
between freedom and rules that in the years of early
childhood the most important things in the entire life
of a man are learned. And no one can schedule or
speed up this process without running the risk of
preventing or impoverishing it. When adults become
aware of such richness in children’s play, they often
come up with the idea of helping and fostering the
process, e.g. by supporting their children with
suitable teachings or didactic materials, as they have
started doing with the so called “smart toys”. This
would remove the principal condition on which this
wonder was based, that is, that adults should “let”
children play. Children’s play, before and outside the
school, means “losing time”, losing oneself in time, it
means encountering the world in an exciting
relationship, full of mystery, risk, adventure. It
springs from the most powerful driving force known
to man – pleasure. This is why the child can even
forget to eat in order to play. Free and spontaneous
play by the child resembles the greatest and most
extraordinary experiences of the adult, such as
scientific research, exploration, art, mysticism;
in other words, the experiences in which a man is
faced with complexity, when he again has the
opportunity of allowing himself to be transported by
the great driving force of pleasure (Bateson, 1956;
Bencivenga, 1995; Bruner, 1976).
The educational proposals, however necessary,
involve a lower, less stimulating, and therefore less
productive level, with a stronger emphasis on duty
rather than pleasure. In the educational proposal the
pupil is deprived of the excitement of the encounter
with complexity and the thrill of autonomously
carving out a part for himself. It is the adult that
proposes to the pupil a portion of that complex world
such that the required activity produces the desired
learning safely and within the prescribed time. That
piece of world loses all its fascination and mystery,
and becomes incomprehensible, detached as it is
from all the rest, and is useful only within the context
of school, not in the broader framework of life.
Perhaps it is because of this link with duty that both
study and work are regarded as ‘ethical’ behavior,
while games and play, intertwined as they are with
pleasure and fun, are trivialized as childish,
unproductive, redundant. Perhaps this is the reason
why children’s play has recently become a privileged
target for consumerism, hence somehow severed
from its original peculiarities of gratuity and lack of
practical purposes. Perhaps this is the reason why
children rejoice and suffer from those same
privileges and deprivations that make philosophers,
artists, researchers and scientists rejoice and suffer.
Because also in the case of those people society does
not accept their activity to be autonomous, creative,
free from practical gain and governed by the pleasure
principle.
4. Walking at leisure towards a spring of fresh
water
Let us try and follow two paths: that of a child who is
walking hand in hand with an adult and that of a
child who is walking on his own.
In the first case the child does not take any decisions,
or rather, cannot take any decisions. If he tries to stop
and pick something up, to change the itinerary, he
becomes the target of the usual reproaches: “Don’t
keep stopping!”, “Move on, or we’ll be late!”, “Don’t
touch it or you’ll get dirty!”. For the adult moving
means going from a starting point to a destination in
186
the shortest possible time, without any incident or
unexpected events in between. It is no coincidence that the
systems considered the most efficient for travelling are the
underground, the motorway and the airplane. These are
systems with the smallest possible number of
“distractions”, that enable you to get to your destination as
quickly as possible. The actual route is a waste of time,
and should be shortened as much as possible. People are
prepared to spend a small fortune to reduce the four hour
journey time between Rome and Milan by half an hour!
In contrast, whenever the child is on his own, he is able to
make decisions: indeed, he has no remedy for the need to
make decisions, otherwise he would have to go back home
at once. At each step he must take different decisions,
whether to continue, change direction, stop and look at
something, pick up an interesting object. And each
decision taken will have some consequences: if he stops he
will have to carefully consider time, otherwise he will be
late; if he picks something up he will have to hide it
because his mother will disapprove; if he changes direction
he will have to look out for signs that can help him find his
way back – and these signs will have to be noted in
reverse, just as they will appear when he is going back!
Each of these operations is a complex one, rich
in cognitive, spatial and affective elements. In a
simple journey from his own home to the
greengrocer’s, the child can discover different
coloured stones, dry leaves, small animals,
magazine pages with strange photographs
(sometimes not “suitable” for him); he can
change his itinerary, taking care not to get lost,
and then he will have to explain to the
greengrocer what he has to buy, pay for it,
accept or refuse the fig he is offered, and finally
return home. How many things this child will
have to tell his mother! For the child, moving
around is an itinerary made up of many
intermediate points, each of them more
important than the destination, which merely
represents the end of the discoveries and of the
adventure. Just the opposite of the adult.
«‘As for me’ said the Little Prince to himself ‘if
I had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I
should walk at my leisure toward a spring of
fresh water’» (A. de Saint-Exupéry, 1943).
These different modes of travelling of the adult
and the child represent a fitting metaphor for
explaining two different philosophies of life,
two ways of dealing not only with space, but
with time, social relations, learning and play. In
order to play, children must have their “fifty-
three spare minutes”: that is, free time, to use as
they wish. In this time they can even experience
the unbearable sensation of boredom, of not
knowing what to do and having to do something
to shake boredom off, with a friend, with an
idea, a toy, inventing something. Time during
which the adult must not, will not want to exert
his authority or skill or even only his protective
vigilance. Time that the child can spend.
And then you need a spring to walk towards. It
is not important to actually get to the spring, but
to follow an itinerary, an exploration, a search.
This is why the space children need to play
must be an unlimited spaced, not bounded, not
impoverished, not designed specifically for
playing.
A child a few months old should not be kept in
his play pen; it is better to put him on an old
blanket. Inside the pen he seems happy, with all
his games near at hand, but he cannot go out, he
cannot take risks… He can crawl off the
blanket, and go as far as disappearing round the
corner form his mother’s vigilant eye for a
moment: his first adventure!
And then one day he will go out the
door and meet another child on the
187
landing, and play with him on the stairs. Go down to
the courtyard together, and then on to the pavement.
Later he will go with other children to the park near
home and then further away, crossing the street,
going to the square, exploring new places, further and
further away. He will observe adults, imitate their
activities, spy on the often strange working habits,
their quarrels, their loves. In order to play a child
needs a city, because the play environment must
grow together with him (Prezza et al., 2000; Chawla,
2001).
And so these children’s gardens, all identical, all
carefully levelled and always provided with
stereotyped equipment such as swings, slippery dips,
merry-go-rounds or the latest wooden play devices,
can only be inadequate. They are places that will
always be the same and where children will always
have to be accompanied to and supervised by their
parents (Ader, Jouve, 1991).
5. The risk of never risking anything
One important difference between being children
forty or fifty years ago, rather than nowadays, is that
in the past parents were often not around. In those
periods of absence of adult control, children could
have their most important experiences, encounter
new things, obstacles, adventures, risks. In those
periods, or at least in particular during those period,
the children used to grow. They tried out
socialization strategies with the other children: the
shameful concession to be accepted by the older
ones, the strange activities demanded in order to play
with children of the other sex, the strength required to
win and that necessary to lose. They tried out their
own skills, each time subjecting them to increasingly
demanding tests under the vigilant gaze of their
peers. They savoured the satisfaction of having
passed the test and the frustration at having failed2.
Nowadays adults are always there. This is the big
difference. If it is not a parent, it is a teacher or else
the coach or the catechism teacher or the library or
play centre operator. If an adult is present the child
does not run any risks (the adult is there on purpose
to prevent this happening) and the child cannot even
explore, discover, or surprise, since the adult is
also there on purpose to explain, anticipate, and
reply (Blakely, 1994). Indeed children have not even
anything special and unique to recount later, since
everything they did during the day was in the
presence of other witnesses and supervisors. This
impossibility of testing the obstacle and facing the
challenge, even when children feel that it is necessary
to do so, leads to the accumulation of such need, a
desire for emotions and risk that will tend to be
satisfied all at once and with violence when
autonomy is finally attained, when the little boy or
little girl has been given the keys of the house or is
driving a motor scooter. And this could be seriously
dangerous and poorly educational. Indeed, the so
called “dramas of adolescence” might well be an
expression of the too long ignored needs of infancy.
This vanishing of the experience of risk from
children’s lives is present not only in the more
obvious field of physical skills and concrete
experiences. It may be found also in the development
of cognitive, emotional and social competence.
If the child cannot explore and investigate, he is
unlikely to be able to cope with new problems, or to
want to tackle them and solve them by himself; he is
unlikely to want to experience the emotion of finding
new, unorthodox, yet effective solutions. Piaget said
that knowledge that is not constructed is of no use,
but if the adult is always present it is hard to avoid
asking him for help and accepting his responses, his
truths (Tonucci, 1996). The school is based almost
exclusively on this relation between who knows, and
therefore teaches, and who does not know, and thus
must learn.
In the social field, for a child nowadays it is almost
impossible to experience the risk and emotion of
meeting new children with whom to try out the
delicate strategies of approach, of getting to know
each other, and sometimes of rejection. His
playmates are almost exclusively his class mates, his
companions at the afternoon courses or the children
of his parents’ friends: friendships that are controlled
and controllable by adults. It will not be easy for a
little boy or girl, who has never been able to select
their play companions, later to choose a life’s
companion when they grow up.
In the field of emotions, adults often feel obliged to
back up and even anticipate the desires and requests
of their children. This erodes the basic relationship
188
between so many things and experiences that
are desired and dreamed of and the few that can be
realized to the children’s great contentment and
gratitude.
If instead autonomy is acknowledged to be important
for the child’s development, in order to enable him to
play and enjoy necessary experiences, the adults
should step back: for a certain period each day they
should not be around. Speaking with the children of
the Children’s Council of Rosario, in Argentina,
about the need and right of children to be able to go
out of the house on their own, a little nine-year-old
girl said: «If they always hold me by the hand, one
day they will have to leave me and that day I’ll be
afraid». And one of her companions said: «Adults
should help us, but from a distance».
6. Starting over from the children
Children and adults make a very similar appreciation
of urban reality. Both acknowledge that the city is
dangerous, there are too many automobiles, which do
not respect pedestrians, the pavements are dirty, in a
bad state of repair and cluttered, pedestrian crossings
are unsafe, and there are a lot of nasty people about.
But the conclusions they draw are by no means the
same. The adults say to the children: “Since these are
the conditions that prevail in the city, you should stay
home, and if you have to go out I will accompany
you and wait for you”. On the contrary, the children
say: “Since these are the conditions that prevail in the
city, they must be changed”.
The children are not resigned, and cannot accept the
trade-off of convenience and the possession of
property against personal freedom. On the other hand,
already at early age, children are capable of
interpreting their own needs and contributing to
changing their cities (Hart, 1997). It is thus
worthwhile hearing what they have to say, requesting
their participation, perhaps because in their name and
for their well-being it is possible to ask adult citizens
to agree to changes they would be unlikely to accept
and promote for themselves, even though in theory
they acknowledge their importance and urgency.
Since 1991 the international project The
Children’s City promoted by the ISTC-CNR
(Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies
at the Italian National Research Council) has
proposed to the city administrations to change
the parameters they use for assessing urban policies,
switching from those of an adult, male, working,
motorist citizen to those of a child. Metaphorically
speaking, to lower their viewpoint to the height of a
child so as not to overlook anyone3. The underlying
assumption is simple but also revolutionary: a city
that endeavours to be suitable for children is a city in
which everyone lives a better life. The child, by
expressing his needs, is a good representative of all
citizens, starting from the weaker ones, such as the
handicapped and the elderly. For this reason, he can
be used as the paradigm for a new philosophy of city
governance.
The project, adopted by several mayors, involves the
city administration in a transverse fashion as it is not
aimed at constructing more children’s structures or
services, but at truly changing the city. Today more
than sixty Italian cities are part of the network, plus
several Spanish cities and the largest cities in
Argentina. Roma joined the project in 2001, taking
on the role of leader city.
The Children’s City project follows a two pronged
approach: autonomy and participation of the children
are the main focuses. Children’s loss of autonomy
was probably the most dramatic effect of the changes
that occurred in city life over the past few decades,
and this change has jeopardized their opportunities
for play (Hillman, 1993). Giving children back their
autonomy could be a good way of recovering the city
and ensuring its survival. If children can go to school
on their own, go out and play with their friends in the
public spaces of the city, also the elderly, the
handicapped and the citizens in general will again be
able to enjoy the experience of walking and meeting
people in the city. Moreover, an increased autonomy
will have also a specific impact on children, through
its effects on their play opportunities: only if a child
is able to go out of the house, meet other children and
enjoy play experiences with them without being
under adults’ direct control, will his play have the
great capacity to involve him completely and lead
him on to great achievements. Only in these
conditions can play be completely fruitful and the toy
become primarily a play tool, rather than a
commercial fetish4. At the same time as the families
decided that the city no longer allowed children to go
outside the home, the great problem arose of how to
spend their time – and how to obtain their forgiveness
for this expropriation.
As usual, the most “suitable” response to parents
189
came from commercial production, which first opened
shops dedicated solely to toys (fifty years ago they did not
exist) and now actual toy supermarkets (Bencivenga,
1995; Kline, 1995; Sutton-Smith, 1986). But it went even
further: it marketed toys, especially for the younger
children, in drugstores, thus suggesting the
Mephistophelian idea of “child equals sick person”.
In the Children’s City project, children’s participation
must be deliberately sought after and desired as a correct
application of article 12 of the UN Convention on
children’s rights, which states that children have the right
to express their opinion whenever decisions concerning
them are taken, and that their views must be taken into
due account. As the city administration is always taking
decisions concerning also children, it is necessary to find
suitable ways and means of hearing their views (Tonucci,
Rissotto, 2001).It exists a long tradition, over 30 years
old, originated in France, in which, to make children
understand the functioning of the City Counsel, a sort of
role-playing game is proposed. In those simulations,
children form political parties, run for elections, nominate
a major and a Counsel that work as their adult
counterparts. Quite obviously, these proposals are
exclusively educational, without any impact on the
actual governance of the city. In contrast, the proposal
advanced by the Children’s City project is
intrinsically political and avoids any hypocrisy and
paternalism, such as those typical of the ‘small
majors’ and ‘little administrators’ scenarios. On
the contrary, here we have a group of children
which gives well-thought suggestions and advice
to the real major, who often listen to them and
modify the city policies accordingly. To better
appreciate the significance of this experience, it is
useful to quote what the Mayor of Rome, Walter
Veltroni, said addressing the children at the
inauguration of the first Children’s Council of the
city5: «I wanted this Council because I need your
advice, your help. It can happen that grown-ups
forget what it is like to be children. That they
forget the things that are important and necessary
for living this time of their lives and do not
remember the dreams, desires and hopes they had
when they had their whole life before them.
Starting from today let us begin to work together
on changing the city». From that moment on, the
children began working to advise the mayor, to
suggest ideas to him, to protest against what they
did not approve. From that day on they began
participating in the city’s governance. From that
day on adults are often in trouble and cannot find
suitable responses to the children’s requests,
which are always justified and precise.
Other proposals exist for enhancing the
participation and influence of minors in public
decision making. For instance, it has long been
debated the idea of the ‘universal vote’, i.e.
extending the right of voting to all citizens since
their birth. The vote of minors, according to these
proposals, would be exercised by the adults in
charge of them, e.g. parents, legal tutors, or
exclusively by their mothers, as suggested by
Philippe van Parijis (among others), to help re-
equilibrating women participation to public life.
This debate, born out of the speculation of few
philosophers and political scientists, is become in
recent years the subject of parliamentary motions,
for instance in Germany6. Although I consider
similar proposals quite interesting, in order to
revive with new elements an exhausted political
debate (Tonucci, 1996), I do not believe they
answer adequately the right to children
participation granted by the article 12 of the UN
Convention, since here there would still be an
adult in charge of taking decisions in their name
and place. In contrast, the Children’s Council, if
properly conducted, might serve to directly gather
the minors’ opinions, without adult interference or
guidance.
190
Now it remains to be discussed whether it is truly
necessary to consult with children on the problems
and drawbacks of our urban life, if such shortcomings
are equally clear to all adult experts asked to work on
them from several standpoints, both psycho-
pedagogical, sociological, and in terms of urban
planning. On the basis of the experience in the last 15
years, I believe it is possible to answer in the
affirmative to this question, for at least three different
reasons. First, children are capable of focusing on
problems that adults are likely to disregard or
minimize, such as the lack of time and places for
playing, the paradox of adults’ over-protection, the
barriers against autonomous mobility for non-driving
citizens, etc.; by listening to the children in urban
decision making, such issues can achieve the degree
of urgency they deserve. Second, political
administrators can effectively use children’s demands
as a democratic leverage to induce adult citizens to
consider and support policies with high short-term
costs (compensated by long-term benefits), on the
ground that “It is your children that are asking for
those changes!”. Third, real participation to city
governance is the most direct and effective form of
education to democracy for our children.
7. Experiences
Let us now examine few aspects of children’s
autonomy and their need to play viewed from their
standpoint, through the proposals and requests that
the children themselves have presented during
several experiences of children’s participation in the
governance of the city.
“We want this city to give us the permission to go
outside the home”.
The prerequisite for children’s play is that the
children are able to go out of the home without being
accompanied by their parents. The Rome Children’s
Council dedicated a whole year’s work to this
problem and in the final meeting held in June 2002
(in which, as it is customary, the Children’s Council
participated together with the Town Council, the
Mayor and the other councillors), Federico, an 11
year old council member, summed up the work
carried out in the following request: «We want this
city to give us the permission to go outside the
home».
This is a surprising request as a child can ask this
permission only from his parents, who are the only
ones that can grant or refuse it. But Federico knew
that his parents refused him permission on the
grounds that “the city would not allow it”, so he went
to the mayor and asked him permission to go outside
the home. Ever since then Federico’s request has
become a working programme for the city of Rome,
which is trying to find a way of increasing children’s
autonomy in such a large and complex city. The
problem is important as it is related to one of most
sensitive issues in current and future political debate,
that of urban security.
The most common proposal for solving the problem
of urban security is to increase the defences: more
individual defences, from armoured doors to personal
weapons; increased social defences, from the police
to closed-circuit TV cameras in the streets. But these
solutions have always proved ineffective and it is a
fact that the United States, a country where
investments in defence are far greater than elsewhere,
continues to be a highly insecure country7. This
conviction was shared by the inhabitants of several
municipalities of Greater Buenos Aires, the great
urban belt with a population of 8,000,000
surrounding the city of Buenos Aires. Tired of the
continual violence and robberies to which their
children were exposed, they decided not to demand a
stronger police presence but rather greater
participation by the inhabitants of the city quarters in
order to safeguard the children on their home-school
itineraries, in accordance with the indications of our
Children’s City project8. They obtained the
involvement of tradesmen, senior citizens and
ordinary people for the purpose of re-establishing a
social surveillance over the children’s itineraries. The
promoters of the initiative have testified that criminal
offences against children have since decreased by
90%. The proposal spread to numerous other
municipalities and is taking hold also in the Federal
Capital. This initiative repeated in Argentina is the
same that is being proposed in many Italian cities:
denoted as Let’s go to school on our own, it involves
allowing elementary school children aged six to
eleven to go to school with their friends without
being accompanied by adults.
These experiences arise out of the deep conviction
that the presence of children in the street make the
street safer. Children going to school, playing with
their friends, reconstruct around them that concern
191
and solidarity of adult neighbours which has only
apparently vanished from our cities. It is obvious that
if everyone accompanies their own child, if the senior
citizens and handicapped persons are locked up at
home, everything is reduced to the private dimension
and no one is obliged any more to care for the others.
But if the children reappear, a new neighbourhood is
set up which produces protection and security. The
children are safe and the people are deeply
committed and content. “It’s great to see children
going off to school on their own again”, reported to
me numerous inhabitants of the districts involved in
the Let’s go to school on our own experience
(Baraldi, Maggioni, 2000; Risotto, Tonucci, 2001).
While security and thus the possibility of going out is
a prerequisite for children’s play, two other
necessary conditions no longer exist and thus the
children demand them: leisure time and public space.
Leisure time for play. With the children of Florencio
Varela, in Argentina, we discussed whether the two
articles of the 1989 Convention on children’s rights –
art. 28 stating the right to education and art. 31
stating the right to play – had the same weight in their
everyday lives. It would be expected that, as they are
two articles of the same law, they would have the
same status, the same respect, the same
consideration. Of course, the children claimed that
this was not the case, that play is not considered
important by adults and that they often do not have
enough time to play, while it never happens that they
lack the time to go to school or do their homework.
Indeed, they claim to perceive the right to go to
school mainly as a duty and the right to play as
something that adults consider to be a waste of time.
We therefore imagined that also the right to play
should be considered a duty and proposed setting
down the number of hours a child ought to play every
day in order to satisfy this obligation. They were
much amused by the idea that they could go to school
one hour later or not go at all, if they had to make up
for the hours they could not devote to play the
previous afternoon because they had been busy doing
their homework, or had to go with their parents to the
supermarket. Framed in this way, the problem
actually looks like a paradox: but if the initial
premises concerning the importance of play are true,
the proposal ought to be taken much more seriously.
Play should be considered as a dutiful investment for
society, not only for the future, as it is usually the
case, but for the present too: children playing in the
city produce changes and improvement starting
today, immediately9.
The children of the Rome Children’s Council, having
followed the same steps as their Argentine
colleagues, involved their school friends in an
investigation of the play-related problems
encountered by children. The most serious problem
was lack of time and the most frequently mentioned
proposal for increasing play time was to reduce
homework. The Children’s Council therefore wrote
an open letter to all the elementary schools in Rome
asking their teachers not to give homework at
weekends and during the holidays. The children
stated their willingness, in these periods, to carry out
several activities, but only the ones they want and
without any supervision. The children are not
pedagogists, so they do not express any opinion on
the validity of homework or whether it is right or not
to set it. They merely consider that the school should
no longer take up all their time and ask that a
(limited) part of this time should be given back to
them so that they can play. However, Silvia, a 10
year old council member, expressed a personal
opinion: «Homework and other exercises do not
develop the imagination, while play does».
The request of the Rome children was given wide
publicity in the media at both local and national
level. Many experts expressed agreement with it and
many schools are evaluating the pros and cons of
conducting experiments based on their proposal.
A public space to play in. The last necessary
condition for being able to play, once it is possible to
go out without supervision and there is enough
leisure time to do so, is to have somewhere to go. We
have already seen that children’s game parks are not
suitable places for such an important activity as play.
In order to play, children need a space that can grow
together with their capacity, their autonomy and their
skills. A space that can accompany them during their
development, which can offer them new experiences,
new discoveries, new treasures. In order to grow up
and to play, the children need the city – no more, no
less.
In this regard the children of the Rome Children’s
Council made a disconcerting discovery: art. 6 of the
Town Police Regulations reads as follows: «All play
on public property is prohibited». In the belief that
this article clashed with article 31 of the Convention
192
of Children’s Rights which since 1991 is incorporated
into Italian national legislation, they wrote to the mayor
asking for the article to be amended. The mayor replied to
the children acknowledging that their grounds for protest
were just and promising to change article 6 of the
Regulations. After this victory, the children on the
Council took another step forward and wrote a letter to
the administrative boards of housing properties in the
whole city, inviting members to revise the regulations that
often restrict or prohibit children’s play in the vicinity of
the buildings. The mayor declared his support also for this
second request by the children and will possibly
accompany it with his personal invitation addressed to the
citizens of Rome. The protest of the Rome children could
therefore have important consequences: it could mean the
removal from public places in the city of signs banning
play, open up a city-wide debate on children’s right to
play in the common spaces shared among different houses
and blocks of flats. Hopefully, it will spread to other
cities, since nearly all of them have local police
regulations containing articles similar to the article 6 of
Rome.
8. Conclusions
It is as though the city had forgotten its children, while it
has done a lot for adults, and an awful lot for automobiles.
It would seem to have done much also for children in the
form of childhood services, but in fact day-care centres,
infants schools, play parks and play centres are all spaces
designed more for parents who do not know where to
leave their children, rather than to satisfy the children’s
real needs. Indeed, in this city children cannot engage in
their most important activity, in their real work, in the
experience that more than any other will determine their
future: playing.
A city cannot accept to be responsible for this severe
deficiency. It cannot deny its citizens the possibility of
exercising their rights, defined and enshrined in the laws
of the land – and the right to play is guaranteed by article
31 of the International Convention of Children’s Rights.
A city can allow its younger citizens to play only if it can
restore its public spaces to their original function. Streets,
pavements, squares and gardens must go back to being
places of meeting and intercourse.
If the city is to succeed in doing this, so must its citizens,
restoring to public use the stairs, halls and courtyards. In
those spaces the children can go back to playing, to
meeting with adults and in particular with the senior
citizens, who will again be able to go out of the
home.
On Vesuvius, the Naples’ volcano, once I was
showed a moss that is able to colonize lava, the hard
stone that covers the slopes after an eruption. This
little plant is able to penetrate the lava and break it
up, slowly transforming it into fertile soil where the
grapevines that produce the famous Vesuvian wines
can grow. Children may be likened to mosses
covering our cities: by their presence and their
games, by invading the public spaces, they are
capable of modifying the short-sighted behaviour of
us adults, forcing us to drive more carefully, to be
more aware of what goes on around us, to show more
respect for the environment in which we live and
where our children and grandchildren will live.
Notes
1
In this critical analysis we should never forget what
significant improvements in life conditions (of citizens in
general, and of children in particular) characterize
contemporary societies, in comparison with previous social
and economic systems. However, it is exactly in the light
of such progress that we cannot passively accept the
violation of primary rights described in this essay, which is
mainly subordinated to selfish and economic interests.
2
The importance of risk as a fundamental component of
play experience has been stressed also in psychology
(Bruner, 1976; Sutton-Smith, 1997), ethology (Spinka et
al., 2001), and philosophy (Bencivenga, 1988).
3
For a better understanding of the reasons, proposals and
experiences related to the project, see Tonucci (1996;
2002) and the web site www.lacittadeibambini.org
4
See the remarks made in the late 17th century by John
Locke concerning the advisability for children to build
their own toys by themselves (Some thoughts concerning
education, § 130). The same passage is also quoted by
Paglieri, this issue.
5
In Rome a Children’s Council has been set up consisting
of a little boy and a little girl, one from fourth grade and
one from fifth grade elementary school (9-10 years), from
one school in each of the 19 Municipalities. The council
members are selected by drawing out of a hat and remain
in office for two years. The Council meets once a month
during school hours, for a whole morning. Twice a year,
the Children’s Council meet the mayor and the Municipal
Council.
6
A number of different scholars came up with similar
suggestions in this respect, apparently in absolute
autonomy one from each other. Among them, the
Norwegian sociologist Stein Ringen, the American
193
political scientist Paul Peterson, the economist Alexei
Bayer, the Italian economist Luigi Campiglio, and, some
years before, Manuel Carballo at Harvard University.
Several of those proposals are quoted in van Parijis (1995),
and most of them converge in the idea of a literal
‘universal suffrage’, such as to guarantee one extra vote
for each minor.
7
The terrible attack of September 11 made approximately
3,000 victims: in the same year, in the United States,
30,000 persons died in incidents caused by firearms
(source: Mann, 2003).
8
Clarin, the Argentine daily newspaper with the largest
circulation, devoted several articles to this initiative. On 16
July 2003, in an article under the title “La gente se une
para cuidar a los chicos camino al colegio” (People join
together to protect children going to school) refers
explicitly to the project The Children’s City, and estimates
that a 90% reduction occurred in criminal acts after the
entire neighborhood, tradesmen and elderly inhabitants
mobilized to guarantee the safety of the children going to
school in the Municipalities of Burzaco, Adrogué, Rafael
Calzada, Martinez y Villa Adelina.
9
Another relevant experience in granting children leisure
time to play is the project More play for everyone, which
led to the celebration of a “Play Day” in Rosario over the
past 5 years involving both children and adults (Tonucci,
2002; Tonucci, Rissotto, 2001). The same project is
currently under discussion by the Town Council of Rome.
References
Ader, J., Jouve, H.: 1991, ‘Jeu et contexte urbain’.
Architecture & Comportement 7, 115-119.
Bateson, G.: 1956, The Message “This Is Play”, New
York: Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation.
Bauman, Z.: 2001, The individualized society, Cambridge:
Polity Press.
Baraldi, C., Maggioni, G.(eds.): 2000, Una città con i
bambini, progetti ed esperienze del Laboratorio di
Fano, Roma: Donzelli Editore.
Bencivenga, E.: 1988, Tre dialoghi, Torino: Bollati
Boringhieri.
Bencivenga, E.: 1995, Giocare per forza. Critica alla
società del divertimento, Milano: Mondadori.
Blakely, K. S.: 1994, ‘Parents’ conceptions of social
dangers to children in the urban environment’,
Children’s Environments 11, 16-25.
Bozzo, L.: 1995, ‘Il gioco e la città’, Paesaggio urbano 2:
30-33.
Bruner, J. S.: 1976, ‘Nature and uses of immaturity’, in J.
S. Bruner, A. Jolly, K. Silva (eds.), Play. Its role in
development and evolution, New York: Basic
Books.
Caillois, R. : 1967, Les jeux et les hommes, Paris:
Gallimard.
Chawla, L.: 2001, Growing up in an urbanizing world,
Paris/London: Unesco Publishing/Earthscan,
de Saint-Exupéry, A.: 1943, Le Petit Prince, Paris:
Gallimard.
Garling, T., Valsiner, J. (eds.): 1985, Children within
environment: Toward a psychology of accident
prevention, New York: Plenum Press.
Garvey, C.: 1977, Play, Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Germanos, D.: 1995, ‘La relation de l' enfant à l'espace
urbain: perspectives educatives et culturelles’,
Architecture & Comportement 2, 54-63.
Gombrich, E. H.: 1971, Meditations on a hobby horse and
other essays on the theory of art, London : Phaidon.
Hart, R.: 1997, Children’s Participation: The Theory and
Practice of Involving Young Citizens in Community
Development and Environmental Care, London:
Earthscan Publication Limited.
Hillman, M. (ed.): 1993, Children, transport and the
quality of life, London: Policy Studies Institute.
Huizinga, J.: 1939, Homo Ludens, Amsterdam: Panteon
Verlag.
Kline, S.: 1995, ‘The promotion and marketing of toys:
Time to rethink the paradox?’, in A. Pellegrini, The
future of play theory, Albany: State of New York
University Press.
Locke, J.: 1996, Some thoughts concerning education,
Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing
Company (orig. ed. 1693).
Lynch, K.: 1979, ‘The Spatial World of the child’, in W.
Michelson, S.V. Levine, E. Michelson (eds.), The
child in the city: Today and tomorrow, Toronto:
Univerity of Toronto Press.
Mann, M.: 2003, Incoherent empire, London: Verso
Books.
Marillaud, J.: 1991, ‘Jeu et securité dans l'espace pubblic’,
Architecture & Comportement 7, 137-145.
Mumford, L.: 1945, ‘La pianificazione per le diverse fasi
della vita’, Urbanistica 1, 7-11.
van Parijis, P.: 1995, Real Freedom for All: What (if
Anything) Can Justify Capitalism?, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Paglieri, F.: 2005, ‘Playing By and With the Rules: Norms and
Morality in Play Development’, Topoi 24, this issue.
Piaget, J.: 1945, La formation du symbole chez l’enfant,
Neuchâtel: Delachaux et Niestlé.
Prezza, M., Pilloni, S., Morabito, C., Sersante, C.,
Alparone, F. R.: 2000, ‘La mobilità autonoma dei
bambini nel contesto urbano e il cortile, il parco e la
strada privata come spazi di gioco’, Psicologia della
salute 3, 81-97.
Rissotto, A., Tonucci, F.: 2002, ‘Freedom of Movement and
Environmental Knowledge in Elementary School
Children’, Journal of Environmental Psychology 22, 65-
77.
Spinka, M., Newberry, R. C., Bekoff, M.: 2001, ‘Mammalian
play: Training for the unexpected’, Quarterly Review of
Biology 76, 141-168.
Sutton-Smith, B.: 1986, Toys as culture, New York: Gardner
Press.
Sutton-Smith, B.: 1997, The ambiguity of play, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Taylor, A . F., Wiley, A., Kuo, F. E., Sullivan, W. C.:1998,
‘Growing up in the Inner City: Green Spaces as Places to
Grow’ Environment and Behavior 30 , 3-27.
194
Tonucci, F.: 1996, La città dei bambini, Bari: Laterza. Francesco Tonucci
Tonucci, F.: 2002, Se i bambini dicono: adesso basta!,
Bari: Laterza.
Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies
Tonucci, F., Rissotto, A.,: 2001, ‘Why Do We Need National Research Council
Children' s Participation? The Importance of Via U. Aldrovandi 18
Children' s Participation in Changing The City’, 00197 Roma
Journal of Community and Applied Social Italy
Psychology 11, 407-419.
Vygotsky, L. S.: 1966, ‘Play and its role in the mental
E-mail: francesco.tonucci@istc.cnr.it
development of the child’, Soviet Psychology 12,
VI.

195